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CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

Deploy-marker annotation

A deploy-marker annotation is a vertical event overlay on a time-series graph marking the moment a deploy (schema change, code release) took effect. It ties an operator- visible action to the post-deploy shape of the metric, making "did this deploy cause the latency change?" a one-glance question.

(Source: sources/2026-04-21-planetscale-query-performance-analysis-with-insights.)

In PlanetScale Insights

Rafer Hazen, 2023-04-20: the post's worked example adds an index to fix a degrading DELETE-LIMIT pattern; on the post-fix latency graph "we see a deploy marker on the query latency graph, labeled #505 — our 505th deploy request to this database."

The marker is keyed on the deploy request number — a stable, operator-visible identifier into the PlanetScale change-history substrate. Clicking the marker lets an operator navigate back to the deploy request for the specific DDL, approvers, and timing.

Why deploy-request number > free-form tag

Sister-products (Datadog, New Relic, Honeycomb) ship release-marker overlays keyed on free-form string tags (release:v2.3.1, env:prod). PlanetScale's version is keyed on the deploy-request integer — structurally reliable because:

  • Monotonic + unique per database; no collision across deploys.
  • Backed by the deploy-request lifecycle (concepts/deploy-request): the marker can link to approval metadata, execution logs, and revert status.
  • Auto-generated at deploy time, not dependent on developer discipline to emit a CI tag.

Generalisation

Any change-management substrate with numbered, durable, operator-visible change units can produce deploy markers on its observability surface: pull-request numbers, CI build IDs, Kubernetes deployment generations, Terraform plan IDs. The constraint is stability — free-form tags drift, numbered primitives don't.

Seen in

  • sources/2026-04-21-planetscale-query-performance-analysis-with-insights — canonical wiki disclosure of the #<N> deploy-request marker on per-pattern latency graphs. Worked example labels the fix deploy as #505, the 505th deploy request to PlanetScale's own production database — structural dogfooding signal that the deploy-request lifecycle is the integration point, not a free-form tag.
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